The Government of National Unity formed after the ANC's loss of its parliamentary majority in May 2024 was always a coalition of necessity rather than conviction. The ANC and the Democratic Alliance share no natural ideological ground: the ANC emerged from the liberation movement with a commitment to state-led redistribution; the DA built its electoral base on a platform of market liberalism and constitutional property rights. The GNU's founding document — a Statement of Intent that all ten member parties signed in June 2024 — managed this contradiction by agreeing on procedural norms while deferring substantive policy conflicts.
Land reform was always the deferred conflict most likely to become irresolvable. South Africa's land ownership patterns remain among the most unequal in the world, a direct legacy of apartheid-era forced removals and racially restricted property rights. The ANC's base — and the EFF, which is not in the GNU but whose support the ANC needs to be electorally competitive — demands land redistribution as both economic justice and political deliverable. The DA's base, disproportionately white and propertied in historical terms, regards constitutionally guaranteed property rights as the foundational guarantee of the post-apartheid settlement.
The specific amendments that triggered the DA's notice would allow expropriation of land without compensation in cases where a court determines that such expropriation is "just and equitable" under a list of factors weighted toward historical dispossession. The DA argues this language is sufficiently broad to make constitutional property protection effectively meaningless. The ANC argues that the Constitutional Court has already approved essentially identical language in a 2021 ruling and that the DA is manufacturing a crisis over a settled legal question.
The DA's withdrawal notice, which gives the ANC thirty days to respond before it becomes effective, has produced a political calculation problem for President Cyril Ramaphosa. If the DA leaves, the GNU loses its mathematics — the ANC would need to find alternative coalition partners from parties whose demands would likely be more, not less, disruptive to governance. If Ramaphosa withdraws the amendments, he loses credibility with the ANC's base and with the EFF, whose cooperation he needs on a range of policy questions even outside the GNU.
Constitutional scholars have noted a third possibility: the ANC could refer the amendments to the Constitutional Court for an advisory opinion before passage, a process that would delay the legislation by twelve to eighteen months without either side formally conceding the substantive argument. Neither party has publicly endorsed this option.
"The GNU was built on a promise that we could govern together without agreeing on everything," said DA leader John Steenhuisen. "That promise holds until it doesn't. This is where it doesn't."